


A Cage Without A Key

by Dancingsalome



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 14:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4839644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dancingsalome/pseuds/Dancingsalome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Donna feels like she is living in a fog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cage Without A Key

**Author's Note:**

> I love Donna Noble and I hated the way she was written out of the series. I think she must feel like something important is missing and feel depressed about it. The title comes from a quote from Elizabeth Wurtzel: That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key. Written for who_contest 's "Blur".

Some days Donna wakes up and the world around her is all dim. It is like everything isn’t quite real, like she’s a bit out of sync with reality. Those mornings she goes out for coffee. Coffee, she had found, helps to sharpen the world again, but she doesn’t want to drink it in her kitchen, having her home in a blur is very unsettling. So she goes to a coffee shop around the corner, sits down with the double espresso and waits until she feels like she belongs again.

This morning, as she stands in the slow moving queue, she sees something in the corner of her eyes that isn’t blurred. When everything else looks like something seen through a foggy glass, the man who has just picked up his order stands out, an almost shockingly exact shape in the mistiness. Donna doesn’t know him, he is a grim-faced man with grey hair and sharp, sharp eyes under heavy eyebrows. He looks at her so intensely that Donna bristles.

“What?”

“I’m just picking up coffee for Clara.”

He’s Scottish, she notices, and she also realises she feels jealous of the unknown Clara that this equally unknown man brings coffee. Donna credits her odd reaction to the strange mood she is in, only she doesn’t feel the least fussy anymore when she looks at him. She feels alert and focused, like a big adventure is just around the corner, one she isn’t invited to share.

“I’m sorry,” the man says sincerely. “I really am very sorry.”

And before Donna can answer the queue jolts forward and she is staring at the barista and the man slips away and is gone by the time she has got her coffee. But this morning she doesn’t need it, the blurriness is gone, leaving Donna feeling angry and confused and terribly energetic. Frustrated and in need of venting she goes home to her Mum and has a terrible row to ease it all off. But when she falls asleep that night she once again hear the stranger’s apology in her mind and for some weird reason it makes her feel a little better.


End file.
